While many are still waiting for their Steam Deck to be shipped out, Valve and partners have been hard at work at ensuring that the library of Steam-supported Steam Deck games is continuing to grow. In fact, just this past week the company announced that there are now over 1000 titles that can be played on their portable gaming device, with more being added each passing day.
In a short blog post, Valve announced that there are now over 1000 games that are either verified or playable on Steam Deck. As for what they mean by either “verified” or “playable” here is an explanation offered by Valve.
Whenever we talk about compatibility rating numbers, we emphasize that this is just a snapshot of a single moment, and that ratings change over time. Even as you read this, partners are working on adding controller support, enabling anti-cheat on Deck, and smoothing out the experience for players on Deck. At the same time, every day we’re fixing Proton bugs that cause issues in some games, and adding new functionality to support others.
As this work takes place, our existing standards for titles to get a Verified or a Playable rating are very high. If a game shows controller glyphs 99% of the time but tells you to ‘press F’ sometimes during gameplay, that’s Playable, not Verified. If 99% of a game’s functionality is accessible, but accessing one optional in-game minigame crashes, or one tutorial video doesn’t render, that’s Unsupported.
For now! This is by design: around the launch timeframe, we believed it was more valuable to prevent false positives (“this game is Verified but part of it doesn’t work”), even at the cost of some appearance of false negatives (“this game is Unsupported but I didn’t notice anything wrong with it”). Even with the current standards, at the rate both we and partners are making improvements, we expect you’ll see many titles transition over the next few weeks from Playable, or even Unsupported, to Verified. We also expect our standards and thinking will adjust as we move farther from launch and get much more feedback from customers and developers.
To sum it up, verified essentially means that everything is in working order and the game runs fully with all UI elements matching the correct control scheme. Playable on the other hand could mean a number of different things, though that title can be played on the Steam Deck with the exception of a some issues such as requiring additional input, or displaying wrong input icons.
As to better communicate this with gamers, Valve has begun rolling out a new compatibility tool that allows developers to directly address their community regarding Steam Deck compatibility, as shown in the image down below for RimWorld.
Steam Deck first quarter shipments are now going out. If you reserved a Steam Deck and are unsure of the status of your reservation, you can check by logging into the Steam Deck store page and scrolling down to the version of Steam Deck you reserved.
If you have a Steam Deck already, or one is currently being shipped and are interested in seeing which games are verified/playable you can search manually here, or view your own library here.